Tails

#1 Updated by goupille 2017-11-08 23:40:21

• Subject changed from Considering updating electrum to Consider upgrading electrum

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2017-11-09 09:51:16

• Subject changed from Consider upgrading electrum to Consider upgrading electrum for SegWit(2x?) support
• Assignee changed from intrigeri to goupille
• Priority changed from High to Normal
• QA Check set to Info Needed

goupille wrote:
> a lot of users are complaining about electrum being (very) old,

I’ve answered this concern in details on Feature #12545#note-5 a few months ago. The Foundations Team is not going to special-case Electrum and track new upstream releases. Critical bugs will be considered though, which I’m doing below:

> from what I understand, the version we ship in tails (2.7.9.1) could be useless in a few weeks, after the implementation of segwit.

SegWit was activated months ago. Granted, it’s not used much yet, but I’m not aware of any big upcoming breakage about it. Pointers?

So I guess you’re instead referring to SegWit2x… whose scheduled hard fork was called off some hours ago, so there’s no emergency on this front (anymore).

> apparently, electrum 2.9.3-1 is now in buster, maybe we should consider if it is possible to upgrade electrum in the next release

FTR my understanding is that 2.9 adds support for blockchain forks, and 3.0 adds support for SegWit.

So, my conclusion is:

• the specific reasons for upgrading urgently provided on this ticket seem to be invalid;
• the general “OMG you’re not shipping the latest version of software X” problem will remain as long as we’re based on Debian stable, and I don’t see why Electrum is a special case.

Specific reasons for upgrading (missing important feature, severe bug) shall be tracked by specific tickets; we have a few ones alreasy; none of them is worth the cost of tracking new upstream Electrum releases, but it’s still worth documenting to the pile (it’s unlikely but possible that they add up to a sum of reasons that makes it worth it).

#3 Updated by goupille 2017-11-09 12:48:14

• Status changed from Confirmed to Rejected
• QA Check deleted (Info Needed)

> So I guess you’re instead referring to SegWit2x…

you guessed right, I’m really not familiar to all this bitcoin things

> whose scheduled hard fork was called off some hours ago, so there’s no emergency on this front (anymore).

great ! I therefore reject this ticket… (note that I only set a high priority to make sure you see the ticket, the urge, in my mind, was for you to see it, not to upgrade electrum)

> FTR my understanding is that 2.9 adds support for blockchain forks, and 3.0 adds support for SegWit.

I’m glad to learn that… I also found easily some tutorials about installing a portable electrum 3.something in tails, so if one really want to use a newer unsupported version, one can install it by him or herself.